On Friday, November 17, 2017 at 8:40:18 AM UTC-8, Andre Jute wrote:
On Friday, November 17, 2017 at 3:04:17 PM UTC, jbeattie wrote:
On Thursday, November 16, 2017 at 9:13:13 PM UTC-8, Andre Jute wrote:
On Thursday, November 16, 2017 at 4:25:14 PM UTC, wrote:
Sounds like the Gates Drive is a solution to a problem yet to be invented!
Andre Jute
"Because we could." isn't a reason, it's an excuse

Yes, I was thinking the same thing, Andre. So why are some of the bicycle manufacturers using it? What do they gain by making this kind of bike?

Because the people in their target market already have one or more of everything else. With a new product they might catch a few fashion victims, or even many fashion victims, what Duane calls "product differentiation". Lou took one for the team here, but not everyone knows a Lou, and some aren't even smart enough to ask him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?featur...c4&app=desktop

OTOH: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWAKtYGJZSM I thought SIS was a joke and step-in pedals, too. You have to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. Specialized produces a lot of chaff -- but some wheat, too. The problem is early adoption, and after a few product generations, you can tell what is wheat and what is chaff pretty easily. I steered away from buying a replacement Roubaix because I didn't want active suspension, but more importantly because I didn't want to buy into proprietary hub dimensions. It's the proprietary stuff that is a PITA.

-- Jay Beattie.

Not all products that survive are necessarily objectively the best. Vide successive Microsoft operating systems, which currently are crap copies of Apple OS, which in turn was a dead system (the bosses couldn't believe their techs were dumb enough to come up with a user-friendly interface that would them all out of work) which Xerox just gave to Apple. But Bill Gates had three advantages: primacy, massive early adoption because, third, Gates was a brilliant salesman who persuaded IBM to put his OS on their early PC's. Peanuts!

Nobody can accuse Lou or me of being technophobic when we turn thumbs down on a new component either by analysis or by trial. We've served our time in the trenches; check what's on my bike, then check what I've tested and thrown off as inadequate; or check the bikes in Lou's garage. The Gates belt in an automobile is a brilliant problem-solver but on a bicycle it is superfluous to requirements. Notice that the only two people who have actually given the Gates Drive lots of attention, one an engineer, one a premium goods marketer, have not volunteered an opinion on the most important aspect of a multi-million dollar investment: whether the Gates Drive will still be around in ten or twenty years. It's competently engineered, therefore it won't fall flat on its face, which in turn means that psycho-economic factors come into play, including irrationalities like whether its time has arrived as perceptively superior and therefore essential to new elite cyclists who may have an entirely different outlook to those whose cycling gestalt was formed by Peugeot ten-speed racing in the 1970s.

When did you last see a shaft drive bicycle? That one failed in the market, again, recently, this time by inadequate engineering (plastic gears! -- Jesus wept). I predicted that it would happen; it was such an obvious case of the marketing department and the cost-accountants overriding the engineers, not always a bad thing for poorer consumers than the ones I generally appeal to but in this case disastrous. However, a shaft drive light enough and durable enough for bicycles isn't rocket science, so, if a shaft drive is possible, and offers all the advantages of the Gates Drive without requiring a split frame and in addition is aesthetically superior, why don't we see shaft drives buzzing around on all sides?

I see racks filled with shaft-drive bikes every day. http://www.galmlaw.com/wp-content/up...1/Biketown.jpg https://www.biketownpdx.com/how-it-works/meet-the-bike

Gates Belts would make sense in a rental fleet or a fleet left outdoors since there would be no issue of chain rusting -- and they would produce a much lighter bike than shaft-drive. The Biketown bikes weigh 59lbs -- but you can still catch air! https://vimeo.com/180757631 (the Lumberyard is an indoor bike stunt track in east PDX).

It all comes down to horses for courses versus churning the consumer market with the supposed latest and greatest. Some odd-ball things are good for some consumers (including institutional consumers) while others are just useless marketing ploys. I think Gates Belts, discs and a few other things fall into both camps.


-- Jay Beattie.